


i held your name inside my mouth

by unheard_secret



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Gen, Post Reichenbach
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-08-12
Updated: 2012-08-12
Packaged: 2017-11-11 23:55:24
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,000
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/484312
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/unheard_secret/pseuds/unheard_secret
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>She can clearly remember Sherlock’s actions that day, and the collective headache he’d caused for the forensics team as he had darted about the scene, pulling at the girls clothes and running his hands over the peeling paper that covered the walls. He’d always had a penchant for the dramatic, regardless of whether it was appropriate or not, and John Watson had brought out the worst in him, even at the start. </p>
<p>(A story of guilt and loneliness. Sally Donovan after Reichenbach.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	i held your name inside my mouth

**Author's Note:**

> I've wanted to tell Sally Donovan's story for awhile and... this isn't it. But it's what I've got, so I've decided to post it anyway. First fic in this fandom so I'd love to hear what you think.
> 
> A big thanks goes out to moodyriver for beta'ing this work! If there are any mistakes then they are mine. I can't stop fiddling, even when I know I shouldn't.

It's raining when she hears the news, and that shouldn't be important -- it rains every other day in London, if it’s not raining every other hour -- but Sally's sitting at her desk staring out at the rain when she's told, and perhaps it's just the endless water running down the windows, or perhaps it’s something else, but everything goes to static and it's like there's a waterfall pounding in her head. 

Everyone is talking about it, but none of them are brave enough to call it what it is. No-one is brave enough to say 'suicide', and only Anderson has been able to say Sherlock's name. But even he went pale after he said it, his eyes pulling tight and his mouth thinning. It wasn't meant to come to this. Being right was meant to feel like vindication, like absolution; it wasn't meant to feel like murder -- however far removed.

Lestrade hasn't come out of his office. Sally can see him in there, sitting at his desk. His head is in his hands, and his shoulders are shaking even though his eyes are dry. She would go to him, offer him what little comfort she can, but her legs aren't working and there's a roaring in her ears pounding through her thoughts, leaving her with nothing other than the painful image of a tall man with a weak chin and an arrogant attitude, stepping off a building because it's better than living in a world where he has lost his pride.

It's just that one small moment that has her caught: that small step forward that changes everything -- that makes the possible the inevitable, that leaves no option but to fall. She sees it again and again. For all she wasn’t within ten miles when it happened, she can picture it perfectly: the expression on Sherlock's face. The pain, the horror, the twisted grimace of a weak man running away from the world. It's so clear it's as though she was there with him when he fell.

In fact, it's almost as though she pushed him over the edge herself. 

...

Lestrade has been told to take unpaid leave until the department gets things under control. The Superintendent had couched it in terms of risk mitigation, and touted the necessity of following procedure, but really he’d been telling Lestrade to go to ground. The public wasn’t happy to learn that their pet detective was little more than an elaborate lie, and now Scotland Yard needs Lestrade to discreetly disappear until they can figure out how much damage has been done, and whether or not Lestrade will be the most convenient scapegoat. Almost eight years’ worth of cases have been called into question -- absolutely anything ever touched by Sherlock Holmes -- and Lestrade's signature is on over half of them. 

Sally hasn't been told to take leave. No-one really tells her anything, not even Anderson, who spends the next week calling in sick and staying at home with his wife. 

She offers to help the team doing the review of Sherlock's work and she's barely finished offering before they decide to unload over fifty cases on her and tell her to look into them, check for any lapses in police procedure, any discrepancies that might stand out, anything that might indicate Sherlock was both mastermind and saviour. 

She ends up with a large pile of files on her desk, so many of them shoved haphazardly into her in-tray that they threaten to fall on the floor. She tries to neaten them but fumbles a little, and the top one slides to the side, flipping open on a picture of a young girl with a shy smile and achingly innocent eyes. 

Emily Rothem: nineteen, raped, dead. Sally remembers this one. She’d been there for every minute, after all. 

It had been the third -- or maybe the fourth? -- case Sherlock had worked since he’d somehow convinced John Watson to trail after him like an obedient puppy, and like most brutal murders, it had been Sherlock’s case from the start. Lestrade hadn’t even considered attempting to solve it without him, and Sally had been frustrated because she had wanted to do her job. She’d wanted to help find a killer. Not babysit Lestrade’s capricious Consulting Detective and his pet soldier as they wandered about the crime scene, ignoring police procedure, and causing so much damage to potential evidence that they had Anderson disappearing to sulk one of the squad cars within ten minutes of their arrival. 

She can clearly remember Sherlock’s actions that day, and the collective headache he’d caused for the forensics team as he had darted about the scene, pulling at the girls clothes and running his hands over the peeling paper that covered the walls. He’d always had a penchant for the dramatic, regardless of whether it was appropriate or not, and John Watson had brought out the worst in him, even at the start. 

Theatrics aside, however, Sherlock had solved the case in under thirty minutes. “The boyfriend’s brother,” he had said, frowning at a small hair he’d found caught on Emily’s stockings. “He’ll be at least ten years older -- probably a solicitor -- with light brown hair and a florid countenance. Almost certainly obese, so I’d take your time -- he won’t be running fast.” Sherlock had given Watson a triumphant grin as he finished, not even bothering to pretend he was performing for anyone else.

Sally can’t remember what Watson had done, but she imagines he’d grinned back, feeding Sherlock’s worst impulses with unthinking acceptance. 

If Sherlock had anything to do with Emily Rothem’s death, Sally will find evidence of his guilt, and she will make sure the world knows. 

Tugging at the open dossier and paging through Emily’s case files, Sally settles down to work. 

...

There’s nothing to interrupt her, not now that Lestrade’s on leave. They probably would have told her to take time off as well, but bureaucracy is as absent-minded as it is pedantic, and she wouldn’t be surprised if they simply forgot about her almost decade-long connection to Sherlock altogether. Right now, the powers that be are busy, but they’ll remember her eventually. Though she’s not sure what will happen when they do.

The newspapers had labelled Sherlock’s suicide a disaster for New Scotland Yard, and for once they weren’t far wrong. (Save one paper which screeched about the dangers of outsourcing, compared consulting Sherlock with calling a help centre in Dubai, and claimed that they had always known Sherlock’s involvement would end badly.They were wrong.)

New Scotland Yard is in an uproar, and it’s not just about bad propaganda. The police force has always been about _being_ competent more than being _seen_ to be competent, no matter what the media might say, and Internal Affairs are making their way through every office. Standard operating procedures are being rewritten, junior officers are being questioned, and senior officers are being punished. No one is going to get off lightly.

Sally hasn’t spoken to Internal Affairs yet, but she knows they’ll be around soon. They’re probably leaving the best for last. They’re morbid like that. 

…

Sally is beginning to see a pattern in the files, but it’s not the one she wants to see, and some small part of her wishes it wasn’t there at all.

Six years ago Sherlock had encountered his first rape victim -- dead by the time he saw him, because Sherlock was only interested in the murders, and no one was foolish enough to let him near someone who was actually alive -- and he’d never solved the case. 

Five weeks after that he had appeared uninvited at another crime scene, talking about observing, and taking samples of everything from the victim’s sputum to the damp rot that was eating through the walls of the abandoned warehouse. Sally can remember him, striding about the crime scene as though rape and murder were simple social phenomena to be examined, muttering about needing a sample size large enough to reveal underlying patterns, and taking cryptic notes. She can even remember the smug look on his face when, after nearly four hours, he’d almost -- but not quite -- given them the murderer. He’d mistakenly directed them to the victim’s uncle instead of her father. But the two men were identical twins, and during the arrest even Sally had been hard-pressed to tell them apart. 

She can also remember him appearing at every crime scene after that, taking samples and offering advice, and proving impossible to keep away, despite her best efforts to stall him at the perimeter. He’d started helping solve the cases on a regular basis, and with each case he solved he’d improved. One of his few unsolved cases remained the first victim, whose killer had never been found. 

Sally frowns as she absently fans the dossiers out on the desk to make a neat pattern of overlapping edges.

Claire Daniels: raped, murdered, unsolved. Bethany Craig: raped, murdered, solved, five days. Tom March: raped murdered, solved, three days. Patricia Dowl: raped, murdered, solved, five minutes. 

There’s a progression to be seen here. She pulls the dossiers back into a neat pile again, and runs her fingers down their spines, barely feeling the rough brush of the cardboard as she stares down at her desk, lost in thought. Sherlock had started out unevenly, a solved case here, and unsolved case there, but within a month he had started to succeed consistently, and by the fifth case he was finding the killer every time. 

It’s not a clear pattern, and there are exceptions. But it’s a pattern.

It suggests that Sherlock was more than a criminal getting high off solving his own crimes. It also suggests that Sherlock was more than just a machine that computed facts and spat out answers. It suggests -- and this has Sally sitting back blinking tiredly at the ceiling in quiet perplexity long after all her workmates have gone home to bed -- that Sherlock had simply improved with practice. 

His success rate in the last year may have been obscene, but it hadn’t always been that way. 

…

Sally’s going home late and getting to the office early. She’s exhausted and dressed in yesterday’s shirt, but she can’t seem to think of anything except Sherlock. He’s even taken to visiting her dreams. 

It used to be that she barely thought about him, except to dismiss him, but now she can think of very little else. 

Mostly she finds herself remembering the first time she met him, years ago, just after she’d started working with Lestrade. Her memory of their meeting is not perfect, but she knows that was late at night and that she’d been standing in the rain by the police cordon, watching as the forensics team milled about the broken body of a ten year old girl. Sally can remember that the child’s condition, which would have been tragic in life, was heartbreaking in death: the poor girl had looked like she’d been living rough for some time, her blond hair almost grey and her arms and body bruised in a way that told of long-term abuse. Forensics had been quiet as they slowly took down details of the scene, and even the police officers near Sally had been subdued. 

However, more clearly than anything else, she can remember when he had arrived, his eyes gleaming with unchecked curiosity and his entire body almost quivering with delight. The first thing he had said to Sally, as he ducked under the cordon, was _Isn’t this marvelous._ And it hadn’t been a question, it had been a statement, a fact, and she had tried to protest, but she’d barely opened her mouth before Sherlock was gone. She can’t remember speaking to him at all that night, though she has vivid memories of watching him crouch over the young girl, playing with her hair.

It’s that phrase Sally hears now, in her dreams. _Isn’t this marvelous._ And it should be marvelous, of course it should, because Sherlock was a criminal and he’s been brought to justice -- not, perhaps, in the way Sally would have preferred -- but justice has been served all the same. 

But it’s no longer a statement, it’s a question. _Isn’t this marvelous?_

And maybe it’s not. 

She can’t help but think of the cases Sherlock has solved over the years, and her previous clarity of vision is being obscured by a thousand reports. It’s being slowly sanded away by the soft rub of cheap paper, and drowned in the dark lines of carefully printed ink. It’s impossible to read the case notes and not have doubts, because no man could organise a thousand crimes, only to be there to solve them just in time. What’s more, there is no evidence that Sherlock had orchestrated a single crime, let alone enough crime to fuel the tremendous number of cases he had worked on over the years. 

There’s doubt lurking at the back of her mind now, where sharp understanding had once rested, and she can’t stop picking at her own argument. Its tattered remains are falling to pieces easily now, crumbling away to reveal a core fuelled by vindictive jealousy. 

She is being forced to concede for the very first time that she hadn’t hated Sherlock because he was a socially inept (probably genius) freak engineering crimes for a perverted high. She had hated him because he succeeded so easily while she had struggled so hard, his apparent effortlessness making her years of hard work appear half-hearted, and his successes throwing a shadow so great it blanketed the entirety of Scotland Yard. He had been what she had once dreamed of being, and she had been _jealous._

...

It’s stupid, and it’s anticlimactic, but when she finally concedes she was wrong, it’s not because of a thousand cases, and weeks of sleepless nights filled with the photos of young women staring up at her in silent accusation. It’s because Sherlock knew, without looking at her more than once, every single time that she slept with Anderson.

Even he couldn’t have had every single hotel in London bugged.

…

“Sergeant Donovan?” 

The young man standing over Sally’s desk is dressed in a neatly pressed suit, with a dark grey tie and sensible brown shoes. His hair is slicked back with a barely acceptable level of product, and he’s gazing at Sally from a grave face with dark, solemn eyes. He is tall, and he should be imposing, but instead he simply looks washed out. With his neat suit and slick hair, it’s as though his personality has been erased, leaving him a shell with nothing but piercing brown eyes and a serious expression. 

“Yes?” she asks.

“Sergeant Donovan, I’m from Internal Affairs. We’d like to talk to you now, if you have a moment.”

It isn’t a request. Sally slowly pushes aside her paperwork and follows as the man leads her toward one of the small multi-purpose rooms off the side of the office. 

“Sergeant Donovan,” says another man sitting at the single desk in the room. 

“Sir,” she says, sitting in the chair opposite him across the desk.

The man who brought her to the room doesn’t stay, but disappears outside instead. Sally wonders, as she watches him close the door, if he’s going to stand guard. She wouldn’t be entirely surprised if he did. 

“I presume you know why you’re here,” says the man, shuffling papers on the table. He doesn’t introduce himself, and Sally isn’t sure if it is an oversight, or a deliberate play to make her nervous -- either way, she isn’t quite brave enough to ask. “We need to talk about DI Gregory Lestrade, Sherlock Holmes, and John Watson.”

The man doesn’t talk much during the session -- when he does, it is only to ask Sally questions -- and he doesn’t react to anything she says. Instead he just sits with an impassive expression, making notes on a neat, white pad. He doesn’t even comment when Sally tells him about her research into Sherlock’s cases, and the unsent report that is sitting in her desk, advising that Sherlock did not appear to have acted fraudulently on any of the cases she reviewed. 

“We were wrong,” she says, and the words feel strangely heavy in her mouth. It’s as though talking hasn’t relieved her her burdened, but instead added to it. She twists her hands in her lap and wonders why people speak of confronting demons as though it’s a cathartic experience. Talking to this man has made her feel nothing but guilt. 

“Thank you Sergeant,” says the man, not looking up from his paperwork. “That will be all.”

Slowly Sally stands, leaving the room with a sinking feeling. She had hoped that once her interview with Internal Affairs was over and done with she would feel better, but she feels nothing of the sort. 

..

I believe in Sherlock has been appearing on the tube. It’s been graffitied on the carriages, and on the walls of the warehouses that line the tracks. It’s there -- in green, in purple, in red, but most often in yellow -- and everytime Sally sees it she feels a burning in her gut, a strange hybrid emotion that is one part guilt and two parts anger. She’s not entirely sure who she’s angry at, but she rather thinks that it might be Sherlock. 

She looks it up online while she’s at work. Morbid curiosity has her typing the phrase into Google, almost afraid to see what results appear. There are over thirty thousand pages that come in response, and Sally isn’t surprised to see that the first one is John Watson’s blog. 

She clicks on it, expecting to see a new update or two. What she isn’t expecting to see is a website transformed. The blog, which had once been read by only a thousand people -- and even that figure was probably too high -- now has over three million hits. There’s only one new entry, made three weeks ago and titled I believe, but the website has not been left untouched since John last posted. Since then there have been over eleven thousand comments. 

Sally slowly scrolls through John’s entry and the comments, wondering why she hadn’t thought to look before.

…  
 _  
I only sent him an email and he found my necklace..._

_I met him in the street, just the once, and he told me that my husband (the cheating bastard) wasn’t at the gym..._

_He used to catch my cab..._

_… he always knew..._

_He didn’t ask for a fee, didn’t even suggest that I should pay him. He said that finding the killer was enough..._

_… absolutely horrible man, but he wasn’t lying.  
_  
...

She’s sleep-deprived and possibly a little drunk when she makes the phone call. He doesn’t pick up, but after a few rings the answering machine clicks on and she makes a rambling apology that circles back on itself and ends with her gasping ‘sorry’ through her tears over and over again until the machine takes mercy and cuts her off. 

The next morning she wakes up with a sore head, a sickening taste in her mouth, and a short text on her mobile from John Watson simply saying _‘please don’t call again’._

She somehow manages to get through the day at work, though every movement feels like it’s going to be the one that makes her skull split into two, and the guilt in her gut feels like it’s clawing its way up her throat. 

She sits at her desk and stares at the blank computer screen in front of her, toying with a pen, wondering if she needs a therapist. She doesn’t have anyone she can talk to, and there’s no-one who wants to listen to how she feels. Her parents are both long dead, and she doesn’t see any of her siblings except out of an awkward sense of duty at Christmas and birthdays. Lestrade is a good boss, but he isn’t her friend, and Anderson hasn’t even looked at her since returning to the office. 

She’s been too busy to make close friends in London, and she hasn’t made any at work during her time in the force. The women at work avoid her, and the men are more likely to be intimidated than flattered by her attention. 

She wonders if anyone would care if she simply chose not to come to work. She’s owed a leave of absence. There’s three weeks holiday waiting for her whenever she might choose to take it. It’s only the thought of long days spent staring out the window, with nothing to do and no distractions, that stops her.

…

The days blur into one another, and it’s already been more than a month since she was given a case, or even invited onto a crime scene. She’s submitted three reports to the panel inquiring into Sherlock’s involvement, each one a progressively less carefully worded f-you to those who still think Sherlock’s guilty, and perhaps she’s a little better after all because it’s been five days and six hours since she decided to stop counting the minutes that have passed since Sherlock’s death. 

...

She’s feeling so much better that it comes as a complete surprise when she feels like crying the moment she bumps into John Watson in Tesco’s.

One minute she’s standing there, her shopping basket in hand, contemplating the virtues of the Lebanese cucumber over the East Asian, and the next she staring at Watson with tears making hot pricks at the back of her eyes. 

She apologises for being there, fumbling with her shopping basket and trying to walk away, but Watson has always been too nice for the company he keeps and he stops her from leaving with a gentle hand to the shoulder. “We should -- that is, we should probably talk.”

“Sorry, I --” she says. 

“No I --,” says Watson, talking over her. 

They both stop, and after a long beat Watson starts talking again. “I should have spoken to you weeks ago.” He looks exhausted, made small by his tiredness, and even his clothing seems a little rough around the edges. Every other time Sally had seen him he had been sharply dressed. Not perhaps fashionably, but neatly, and always looking like he’d put some care into his appearance. Now he’s in frayed jeans that haven’t seen a washing machine in days, and his shirt hasn’t even been ironed at the cuffs and collar. This is what she did to him, she and Anderson, when they went to Lestrade with their conspiracy theories and their envy. 

“No, that’s --” begins Sally, putting her shopping basket on the ground and searching in her handbag for a tissue. She’s determined not to cry, but her nose is running, and she’ll feel safer with the tissue than without. “That’s all right, I didn’t expect -- that is -- I should be the one apologising. I really should.” She rubs at her nose with the tissue, and blinks fiercely, thinking that if Watson asks about the tears trapped in her lashes then she’ll claim to have allergies.

Watson looks at her for a long moment, a furrow appearing between his brows, his face falling into creases formed by exhaustion and grief. His face has aged years, not months, since Sherlock’s death, and once Sally has noticed that she can’t look away; there’s more grey in his hair, though it’s hidden well, and he’s carrying his cane in his left hand. He looks old. Older than he did that first night she met him nearly two years ago, when he had just been back from a warzone.

“You don’t have to apologise,” he says eventually, and even Sally can tell that he’s just mouthing the words. 

“I do,” she says, slowly fumbling in her handbag for another tissue, partly because the one she had is no longer fit for use, and mostly because she has to drag her eyes away from Watson. He’s looking at her with an exhausted compassion that makes her want nothing more than to crawl away and hide from his gaze. Anger would have been better. As it is, she can’t help but see herself as Watson must see her: a somewhat plain woman, made pretty by artifice, edging toward thirty-five, her face lined with exhaustion, wearing an ill-fitting and stained blouse that is barely work-appropriate because she hasn’t had the energy to do the washing in over a week. Pathetic and pitiful.

She wipes her nose roughly. “I do need to apologise,” she says, her voice a little fierce. “And not just for the phone call. I was wrong. I was wrong, and now Sherlock’s dead, and I need to apologise. I can’t not. I just -- I’m so sorry. When I heard about it, well... all I could think about was him. At the time I thought he was running away from his lies, but he wasn’t, was he? It was real all along, and I was just too jealous to see it and -- I’m sorry. That’s all. I’m so sorry.”

John doesn’t say anything for a long moment as Sally stops talking. Her hands are shaking a little as she tries to tuck the used tissue back in her handbag, and in the end she chooses to just keep it, crushed loosely between her fingers. 

“What --” John starts while looking down, but after a moment he pauses and clears his throat, looking up at Sally. “What do you want me to say?” he asks. “I can’t give you absolution. If that’s what you’re looking for? But I don’t blame you. Not anymore. Does that... Is that what you want to hear?”

Sally looks at him for a long moment, then closes her eyes in a long blink, feeling the hot sting of tears pricking at the back of her eyelids. She can’t say anything. For a long moment all she can think about is the fact that John Watson -- who has every reason to despise her, who should be angry at her, who should be filled with hatred for her -- has just said he doesn’t blame her. She wonders why it comes as such a surprise. 

“I -- “ she starts, before realising she doesn’t know what to say. 

“It’s -- you weren’t the reason Sherlock jumped,” says John, and Sally can’t look at his face, so she looks at the worn pattern on his shirt instead. It’s faded blue, gone almost grey in places, and Sally can’t pinpoint why, but it taints her sorrow with bitterness. John has lost one of the most important people in his life, and he is wearing his grief on his face, and in his clothes. It’s there in every step he takes while leaning heavily on his cane, and it has marked his hair prematurely with grey.

He carries his grief about him like it’s a cloak, like it’s armour: as though he was shattered by Sherlock’s death and he’s wearing his loss as protection, letting it shield him from the world while he slowly pieces himself back together again. 

She can’t be here any longer. She turns to leave, and strides down the aisle, ignoring John’s voice behind her. He’s asking her to stay, but she knows he doesn’t mean it -- she wouldn’t if she were him -- and she’s not sure she can stand another moment of his kindness. She brushes past other customers, through the store’s wide doors, and out into the weak twilight that marks the end of another day.

…

“You were entirely too captivating,” says Sally, slowly pressing her fingers into the smooth surface of Sherlock’s gravestone. “You were all sharp edges and arrogance, and I hated you.” She frowns a little, her dark eyes taking in little more than the black stone she’s kneeling beside. The grass is damp, but she doesn’t care if it stains her trousers. 

She hasn’t been here before. It never felt necessary. Sally’s never been one to believe that anything of a person is left in their bones. After years in the force she has had more dead bodies in her life than friends, and if she had any illusions about death they are long gone, and she hasn’t regretted the loss. Funerals, burials, loving goodbyes, and the closure offered by a public display of grief -- those are for friends and family and whatever she had been to Sherlock...well, she hadn’t been his friend. 

“I still don’t like you,” she says, because it’s important to be honest. “I think you were an insufferable prat, and a malicious prick, but...” She pauses wondering what to say next.

“But...all of that aside,” she blinks down at the grass about her knees, “you were not a fraud, or a criminal, and I need to apologise for the part I played in your death. You didn’t deserve to die, and more importantly you didn’t deserve to die the way you did.”

She sighs, pausing for a long moment as though she’s waiting for something. Whatever it is, it doesn’t come, and with eventually she slowly stands, brushing at the damp stains the grass left on her knees. 

On the way to the cemetery she had imagined yelling her frustrations into Sherlock’s headstone -- spilling out years worth of stored vitriol while the grass and trees stood silent witness to the event, emptying herself of Sherlock and everything he made her feel. But... 

Now, she finds she has nothing else to say. Months of being the being the tired woman at the back of the room having a silent breakdown, and she can’t think of anything else she’d like to add. 

“It might take another month, it might take a year, but your name will be cleared -- we’ll see to that. I know John Watson is already doing everything he can to make people understand the truth, and I will help him if I can.

“Rest peacefully, Sherlock,” she says. “You won’t be hearing from me again.”

Then, without looking back, she turns and walks away.


End file.
